This article is from the public account " Tutututuyu (xtutux6) ", author Lin An.
There's a saying that goes like this: "When the day comes when going to work is such a miserable thing to wake up every morning, it's time to think about changing jobs."
I don't know since when, the 9-to-5 job that people from the 1960s and 1970s looked forward to, has become more and more tired of young people from the 1980s and 1990s.
"There are always 30 days a month when I don't want to go to work."
"No one is skilled enough to sell their time for money."
"Going to work is a waste of time and youth."
......
Such remarks frequently appear in our social networks and lives, so "work" sounds like a very sad word.
According to the "2017 Resignation and Salary Adjustment Research Report" released by a domestic job search website, the turnover rate of fresh graduates has continued to soar in the past three years, of which it was as high as 26.5% in 2016.
"Why don't young people now want to go to work?" There must be intricate reasons behind any social phenomenon.
As a post-90s generation who has been in classes for more than 3 years, I am full of curiosity about this question. So some time ago, I read a lot of articles about "not going to work", and I also chatted with my friends who are no longer working, and I learned a lot.
Today I'm here to talk to you: "Why do young people in this era don't want to go to work?", and "If you don't go to work, what can you do?"
"Going to work and working are two completely different things"
First of all, we need to make a point clear: "going to work" and "working" are two completely different things. Most people say they "don't want to work", but it's not actually "don't want to work".
This point of view was awakened by Chen Danqing while watching the 2016 issue of the talk show "The Round Table Party", "Staying: How to Break If You Don't Want to Work?".
"Going to work" is a "commercial transaction" between an individual and the company. The company pays for your labor time, and you must follow the company's rules and regulations and go to the specified place at the specified time to do the specified things.
And "work" is one of the means by which a person settles down or realizes self-worth.
In short: Going to work is doing things for others, and work is doing things for yourself.
In the Baidu Tieba of "The Three Walks of Qiang Qiang", a netizen's definition of "work" and "work", I think, describes it very appropriately.
【Going to work】= With a reluctance, reluctance, and passiveness, it is done by the young and middle-aged people from ordinary families who have no special talents and who are simply to not be stigmatized as "unemployed". thing. "Fucking around" is the common mentality of office workers. Because the income is not high, but it cannot be without this income, the proportion of patients with "anxiety disorder" is relatively high. Most obvious. Of course, there are also some people due to inertia (they get used to it), and they don't have high requirements for life, so "fun living" is naturally the best day for them.
【Work】= with a positive attitude, not simply to avoid being discriminated by others as unemployed, to have a goal and to combine their own abilities, to realize their own value at work and to do it for people who can enjoy it matter.
So don't confuse the concepts of "work" and "work". Those who say they don't want to go to work all day may just not want to go to work, not work. Work has a strong driving force. Chen Danqing said that he does not like to go to work, but he can wake up like a bug and work until late at night.
Now that the true meaning of "going to work" is clearly defined, let's take a look at why today's young people don't want to go to work.
"The development of the Internet has made us see each other's lives clearly"
In fact, I think most people are not born to hate working. Otherwise why is burnout generally seen in those who have been working for a few years, not in recent graduates. On the contrary, fresh graduates who have just left school are the most motivated to go to work because they are fresh, curious and inexperienced. Before we have a clear concept and experience of going to work, we often confuse “going to work” with “work”, and want to get the pleasure that work can bring from going to work.
But the result is often that the longer you work, the more you discover that the essence of going to work is actually to make a living. If you are lucky, it may also bring you a sense of accomplishment other than money; if you are unlucky, you are simply doing a transaction of time for money, so some people complain that "going to work is a waste of youth".
But living in a material society, if a person wants to survive, he must sacrifice something in exchange for money. Sacrificing time can be said to be the cheapest transaction that everyone naturally owns. Therefore, working to make money has become a common practice in this society. The meaning behind it is: if you want to survive, you have to go to work.
Therefore, even if most people are not so happy at work, or are doing things that they are not interested in, they can only swallow it up. After a long time, the feeling of burnout will come naturally.
The burnout brought about by work is believed to be felt by every generation. But why did the generation of our fathers and mothers simply quit their jobs when they never heard of anyone who didn't want to go to work?
The point of view in "The Round Table" is very interesting: it is related to the rapid development of the Internet.
In an era when communications and the Internet were not so developed, people's lives were relatively poor and simple. At that time, the focus of their work and life was in their own circles, and they did not understand the outside world and how people lived.
But in the Internet era, information is more open and transparent. From the world to the small, you can see everyone's lifestyle and living conditions: who and so have gone abroad to study, who and so have started businesses, and who and so are making money while traveling around the world. now...
In addition, all kinds of media, advertisements, and Internet products are changing every day to provide various lifestyles: elites should drink a certain brand of coffee and wear a certain brand of watches; the standard for the middle class is one house and one car, two a year. trips abroad; a girl with a monthly salary of 20,000 avocados a day; a middle-aged man who is not greasy is sweating in the gym on weekends...
On the one hand, people of different classes see each other's living conditions unreservedly; on the other hand, society is increasingly advocating the same values and standards of success. Gradually, everyone was squeezed into the same place, fighting in the same direction.
Sadly, however, the East is a hierarchical society, and the comparison between people is extremely heavy. Therefore, those who cannot break through the status quo can only envy the lives of others and try to improve themselves, while lacking the fighting spirit and ability to struggle, so they are constantly frustrated, and in the end they can only become marginalized people in society, repeating day by day. Going to a hopeless class, living in disobedience.
"Young people who seem to have a lot of choices actually have no choice"
Although there are more things young people can do without work now than in the past, the pressure of survival in first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen is also greater than in the past.
Especially for those young people whose family background is generally disregarding the opposition of their parents, they leave their hometowns to work in big cities without hesitation. With neither the support of their parents nor the financial strength to take risks, young people who seem to choose more have no choice at all. So I had to complain about "don't want to go to work" and continue to work hard.
Therefore, "don't want to go to work" is actually a very frustrating and powerless sentence for contemporary young people. What it implies is the helplessness of having no choice but to go to work.
If the group described above is the majority of the "do not want to go to work" group, then the young people who really made the decision to resign and no longer go to work can be said to be the "real warrior" in this group of people.
What can I do without work?
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Negative choice: squatting at home
Among the people who do not go to work, there are two contrasting states: the negative state of eating and waiting for death, and the passive state of living by; and the positive state of breaking the boat and letting go.
Common manifestations of the negative state are: going home to eat the old, squatting at home, selling existing assets and sitting on the mountain (this phenomenon is more common in wealthy family members) and so on.
Today, when the concept of "gnawing the old family" is not a new concept, the new concept of "squatting family" has appeared in people's sight again.
"Squatting", as the name suggests, refers to unemployed young people who do not go to work and squat at home all day doing nothing. Most of them exist in first-tier cities with fierce competition such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. A while ago, the domestic psychology self-media Knowyourself published an article to analyze the unique phenomenon of "squatting" in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. The article described them this way: "These people are highly educated, unemployed, neither enthusiastic nor striving. They live in rented houses in first-tier cities, they can't go home or stay, and they have nothing to do all day long."
The product of the era of "squatting" fully verifies the phrase "hard work may not be successful, but it's really comfortable not to work hard". I sometimes wonder if our age is so hyped about "hard work" that everyone seems to wind up as if a life without hard work is not worth living. It is obvious that some people are lazy by nature and are not interested in anything, but they are forced to make progress by the values of this society, and desperately search for a goal worthy of their life.
In "Round Table School", Dou Wentao talks about a young man who returned to his hometown to "squat" after resigning his job as a teacher. He didn't even have the desire to eat or drink when he was thirsty. After not seeing him for a long time, the villagers found him starving to death.
This should be the extreme of "squatting".
Chen Danqing said: Some people are born not interested in this world, but they can't choose to be born. They looked at the world and found there was nothing to live, so they chose to leave.
It's sad to think that there are a group of people who are living in such a strange way in this shoulder-to-shoulder world.
Turning to look at the real world, countless young people who don't know what kind of life they really want, flock to Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou with most of the struggling people, only to find that the competitive world doesn't seem to be their hometown. But there was no way back, so I had to be a "squatter" in Beishangguang. However, after squatting for a long time, there was a day when I couldn't squat down, and finally I had to go out to find a job again and repeat the same mistakes.
For those who were born in big cities, or whose families are so wealthy that they can live comfortably even if they don’t work, they can live comfortably with their existing assets even if they don’t go to work. several years. A friend of mine told me that there are such people around her. In the past, she had always wondered why they had money to spend even if they didn't go to work all day. One day, she couldn't help but ask the reason, and then she came to know: it turned out that they had no money to spend, so they sold the apartment, and they could live for several years after selling a few million.
"But this is not a solution in the long run. There must be a source of money." said my friend.
This kind of sitting on the mountain and not going to work is actually a relatively negative state.
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Positive choice: work for yourself
The active state of not going to work is more complicated, but they have one thing in common: they all changed from "working for others" to "working for themselves". I have sorted out the choices of all the people who do not work among the people I know, and they can be basically divided into the following categories:
1. Start a business
Most of these people are boys. Most of them have strong goals and don’t like to be restricted by rules and regulations. They are not necessarily outgoing and have leadership, but most of them are unconstrained and long for financial freedom.
Entrepreneurship is more suitable for those who have certain network resources and independent ideas, and who have a strong ability to withstand pressure and accept a fulfilling and busy state. At least none of the people around me who start businesses have had an easy life.
2. Open a shop to do business
Most of my friends who open stores and do business are girls. Most of the stores they open are in the catering industry, and they all have a boyfriend or husband who is also in the industry. The two of them manage the store or expand the business category together.
Many people may be curious about how much the initial capital for opening a store is? In this era when the Internet is prevalent and traditional industries are declining, can opening a store make money?
I understand that opening a store is indeed risky for people who do not go to work. The starting capital is at least 200,000-300,000, which is the investment to open a small coffee shop in a second-tier city. Whether a store can make money depends on many factors: initial investment, store positioning, business management, brand marketing, etc. Among the stores opened by friends around me, some have started to make profits after opening for a few months, some are very popular, and they have calculated the return of their capital within one year, and some have lost 1 million per quarter. The basic rule is: the higher the initial investment, the slower the return.
Therefore, opening a store requires a higher accumulation of funds for a person. If you use your own money to open a store, the risk is still quite high.
3. Freelance
There are all kinds of freelancers around me: self-media people, freelance writers, travel experts, free traders, sand painters, jewelry craftsmen, photographers, pastry chefs, etc.
Freelancing is also a profession. It relies more on a person’s special skills. Basically, those who can live by freelancing have certain network resources in their own exclusive fields and are extremely self-disciplined. But whether it is good or not is a matter of benevolent opinion.
4. Slash Youth
"Slash Youth" is also a product of the new era.
Slash youth, that is, young people who do several things at the same time. The times are becoming more and more diverse, the Internet has made communication between people more convenient, and the convenience of telecommuting and online work has made it possible for a person to do several things at the same time.
The colleague around him who seems to be unknown during the day may continue to get off work on other cool things at home after work. In the context of fast-paced life and increasingly competitive times, we are increasingly uncomfortable with doing one thing at a time.
Among the people I know, there are people who run their own self-media while working, some freelance photographers who open a hand-made Taobao shop at the same time, and some who open a coffee shop and run their own advertising studio. I myself run a public account and take photos while working. A person's energy is always limited, but the reason why one can persevere is because the times are changing too fast, and no one knows that the occupation they are currently engaged in will one day become a sunset industry, or be affected by policies and face elimination. On the other hand, it is true that he has a wide range of interests and strong curiosity. Under the premise that the existing work cannot satisfy his interests, he always wants to do something that interests him to make up for the gaps outside his work.
The psychological self-media Knowyourself also wrote an article related to the "slash generation", trying to analyze the reasons behind the slashes. The conclusion in the article is: behind the slash trend, it reflects the weakening global The economic situation, and the growing sense of insecurity among young people. The slashes were chosen because many people no longer believe in the stability of society, nor do they believe that success and leaps in class can be achieved by long-term, hard work.
I agree with this point of view. It is too difficult to achieve breakthrough wealth growth simply by working from 9 to 5. Take the most popular and highest paid programmers as an example. They work hard, day and night, and risk early baldness and sudden death. After working for more than ten years, the annual salary may not be more than one million. This is still the group of people who do well. But what can one million do in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou? Not enough down payment for a suite in the city.
“What’s heartbreaking about this era is that it makes individuals struggle for self-realization, but struggle does not necessarily bring self-realization.”
But I think that before the trend of the times changes, it is not wrong to learn a variety of postures to defend yourself.
...
These are the choices you can make when you are not working. Either way, it seems that it can be expanded into an article for specialized analysis.
I also plan to make a series on the topic of "not working". In the next period of time, I will interview the young people around me who are not working one by one to see how ideal the life without work is.
If you are a young person who is not working, or you have someone around you who is no longer working, you are welcome to recommend it to me. As long as the experience is unique, I am very happy to chat with one.
In the next issue, I will share the stories of three post-90s youths who are working in brick-and-mortar stores who do not go to work. If your dream is to open your own store in the future, or you are preparing for this, the next article should be of some help to you. .
Partial quote:
True Story Project "Squatting: Young People Doing Nothing in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou"
Knowyourself "The Slash Age: Why Do We Have Several Careers at the Same Time?" 》
"Round Table School. See the ideal" 20161202 "How to break if you don't want to go to work"
This article was first published on the public account: Tutututuyu (xtutux6) , a record of urban youth life, giving you 100 ideal life without work.